Now make sure all the bug fixes are committed and pushed to the remote repository. You can check this at git.xfce.org as well.

For the version number the micro version is increased by 1. So 4.12.2 becomes 4.12.3.

Development releases

Unstable releases are created from the master branch, which is in this period in feature-freeze. There we use an odd minor number. So the first development release is for example 4.11.0, then 4.11.1 etc.

Build the tarball

If you are sure all the fixes are committed in the correct branch, its time to prepare the release.

Update NEWS

Update the NEWS, AUTHORS, README, THANKS, HACKING etc. files to credits are given where due.

Update version number

Edit the configure script template configure.ac.in.

Set the package version (<package>_version_major, <package>_version_minor and <package>_version_micro) to the version you want to release.